Once a Killer, Always a Killer

"Killing a mouse could get you 5 years " says the Times of India dated May 11, 2011. Hmm..... I can now safely say I think "and rightly so" when I read that headline. No creature deserves to be tortured the way lab animals are and put to death at the whim and fancy of any random scientistl. If humans have a right to life, so have animals. I am certainly pro-life and in favour of animal rights. I am no longer a researcher. So no reason I should be on the defensive.

Long ago shortly after the sun, moon and the stars came into existence, I had a brief fling with science and research. What I had to do for a living was not what I was entirely comfortable doing. There was a conflict between scientific practicality and human emotionality and sentimentality.

But late in the evening my smirk was wiped off my face . I was hauled over the coals  by a certain member of the medical fraternity for the cold blooded murder of a mouse which he treasured very greatly. It had been tortured badly and struggled and suffered at my hands before it gave up the ghost. The headlines in the newspaper flashed in my mind's eye. Mouse dragged along the floor by its tail, hit on the furniture mercilessly, sat on, dragged from the table to the floor before being put to death.

You have guessed it right. This was a mouse of a different species, not furry and white  as you may think with a pink nose and whiskers, but a black one, hard in texture as well as being a part of the hardware of dh's favourite companion - the computer. 

I can't help it if this mouse has a tail which is a few metres longer than its little body. I sit on my bed propped up against pillows working at the laptop. At 7 pm, my mom comes along and wants me to migrate to the front room to watch telly with her. But I can't bear to part with the laptop and with the Internet. So I get up, pick up my laptop and set off. I forget the mouse, which drags behind me, falls off the bed and then drags behind me a step or two before I realize what is going on and pick it up. After a couple of months of such torture, the mouse obviously breathed its last.

It was replaced by another mouse which was dug out from the drawer. But the old mouse did not have long to live. It was of course old. But fate had decreed that it would stop working only after I had laid hands on it. So finally today I was given an ultimatum this morning. If I tortured mice like this, I did not deserve to own one.

I have spent the whole day having vivid images of myself behind bars for the next 10 years - 2 X 5 = 10. Mercifully I was given a new mouse. I keep my fingers crossed and hope I treat this one better than the other ones. But I don't trust myself. Old habits as they say die hard. Once a mouse killer, always a mouse killer, no matter what the species. Yes, I have a dark secret - a skeleton in my cupboard you may say - I am a serial mouse killer.

So if I vanish off the radar, you know where I have vanished to. Meet you after 10 - 15 years!